Mozilla recently announced that they would be dismissing 250 people. That's a quarter of their workforce so there are some deep cuts to their work too. The victims include: the MDN docs (those are the web standards docs everyone likes better than w3schools), the Rust compiler and even some cuts to Firefox development. Like most people I want to see Mozilla do well but those three projects comprise pretty much what I think of as the whole point of Mozilla, so this news is a a big let down. [...]

One of the most popular and most intuitive ways to evaluate an NGO is to judge how much of their spending is on their programme of works (or "mission") and how much is on other things, like administration and fundraising. [...] Mozilla looks bad when considered in this light. Fully 30% of all expenditure goes on administration. Charity Navigator, an organisation that measures NGO effectiveness, would give them zero out of ten on the relevant metric. [...]

Mozilla now thinks of itself less as a custodian of the old Netscape suite and more as a 'privacy NGO'. One slogan inside Mozilla is: "Beyond the Browser".

Regardless of how they view themselves, most of their income comes from helping to direct traffic to Google by making that search engine the default in Firefox. Google make money off that traffic via a big targeted advertising system that tracks people across the web and largely without their consent. Indeed, one of the reasons this income is falling is because as Firefox's usage falls less traffic is being directed Google's way and so Google will pay less.

There is, as yet, no outbreak of agreement among the moral philosophers as to a universal code of ethics. However I think most people would recognise hypocrisy in Mozilla's relationship with Google. Beyond the ethical problems, the relationship certainly seems to create conflicts of interest. Anyone would think that a privacy NGO would build anti-tracking countermeasures into their browser right from the start. In fact, this was only added relatively recently (in 2019), after both Apple (in 2017) and Brave (since release) paved the way. It certainly seems like Mozilla's status as a Google vassal has played a role in the absence of anti-tracking features in Firefox for so long.

From:
http://calpaterson.com/mozilla.html

I'd say look at the graph then skip to reading the "Results" section.


That's £2.4 million being paid annually to a single individual in a "non-profit" organization.

Here's their response when challenged:

Hey Mozilla, hire me as chair for a 90%+ discount on the market and I'll give you both increasing browser usage and company growth within the year.

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If it were just the issue of a default search provider, I doubt google would have bankrolled it for so long. There is also the matter of other google services, silently installed and enabled by default. "Safe Browsing", which audits every URL you visit by sending that data to google, is the most important of these.

You have to consider that when google launched their own browser just over a decade ago, it was in direct competition to firefox, while still funding the project. By being funded primarily by google, one could argue that mozilla placed themselves in a position where they could be contained while allowing chrome to grow - as it did to a position of dominance in a very short space of time.

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This is just another inevitable result of the loss of Free Software as the vital principle, to be replaced by the empty slogan, "Open Sauce".

When Software Freedom was the object of the overall exercise and the thing demanded by users, the development culture more nearly met that goal and the product itself respected the user's Freedoms - that was its reason for being!

Almost every discussion of Privacy treats it as resulting from some policy or legal definition, and always something to be granted to the user, optionally.

Privacy does not result from policy, privacy is the essential result of mutual respect among equals, and nothing else. I respect your privacy because I want you to respect mine, and we are both Free from intrusion on our private lives by the other. Privacy is lost to one when the other does not extend that respect to them, period.

Freedom absolutely must include freedom from unwanted tracking and data collection of our individual activities, online or otherwise, and Privacy is a by-product of that mutually respected Freedom. Loss of Privacy is the flashing red indicator light that tells you Freedom has been lost.

The Mozilla CEO's defense of their cut of the loot identifies the salary of other CEOs as the only real goal to be met, respect for the Freedom and Privacy of users of the product not being on the radar at all. So it is not surprising to see the product reflect that point of view.

All such changes in the behavior of what were once core Free Software custodians and institutions result at least in part from the loss of Software Freedom as the vital principle.

As long as users continue to use those products and accept those intrusions, the descent into darkness will only accelerate, following some CEO or Judas' goat shouting, "Open Sauce! Open Sauce!", all the way to the bottom.

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4) Profit!

I see what he did there. He skipped straight to question #3. A savvy organization might answer "No, Mozilla should not have executives" and opt instead for decentralized management such as Teal or Holacracy.

She answered those self-asked questions with irrelevant waffle, which is why I replaced them with the ellipsis. I probably should have made that removal more explicit.

The full text is at the URL at the top of the quote. (Requires a couple of third-party scripts to actually show the Q&A part of the page.)

Thanks for pointing that out. Woops, i assumed the wrong gender based on the name Mitchell. I DID read the full text before posting. I saw that she answered question #2, but her answer was pretty much "Trust me, in my experience you need executives."

Excellent post and agreed on all points.

For me, every time I try to see the positives on Mozilla, issues like this one rear their ugly heads and the misgivings about that corporation/foundation and the project itself remain.

14 years ago you had "legal" people pestering Debian about trademarks and logos: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...cgi?bug=354622

I can't think of any other examples of such behaviour from other projects offhand.

More on "Safe Browsing", that often overlooked feature which falls into the "privacy you have to opt in to" category:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Phishing_Pro..._Documentation

You can see from the first paragraph of that section it attempts to make the case for data collection along with the rather telling "smoke and mirrors" statement (which would immediately have one assume that it is exactly "smoke and mirrors").

There is some faulty logic going on there. a) I doubt that even any of the users, who presumably wanted and downloaded, a free web browser, explicitly also wanted to "contribute" their data (in the form of all URLs visited) to google (a 3rd party) and b) the option was always ON by default and c) planted in the browser and marketed as a safety feature - with no visible disclaimers or initial "opt in/out" choice for the user regarding data being sent to google in the background.

The current privacy policy notice.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/

Google geolocation:

Nothing in initial installation, nor post installation config, indicates that google "geolocation" (again a 3rd party) will be in use as standard, nor is there a UI element to turn it off last time I checked (it's an about:config tunable). Again the user is directed to google's privacy policy.

There is also the DNS over HTTPS issue. This is yet another "opt out" and also smacks of yet more "smoke and mirrors":

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...dns-over-https

Instead of being a user choice, the decision is made by those who "know best" and your DNS traffic is redirected via the infrastructure of a specific US based corporation. Once again the "opt out" takes the form of a "hidden" about config variable.

Note that this section is blatantly listed under the "risks": (!!!???)

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My question:

Does all this talk imply that Mozilla is in the middle of doing its users the dirty?

I use it, and like it mostly, but when I start questioning motives, the "alternative to Chrome" thing is seriously damaged.

No simple answer to that one. From my perspective, look at the evidence, read into the built in google provided telemetry in particular and then read the claims made here:

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

Who are they referring to there? Certainly not google because:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/
You can't make inferences about supposed "shady" policies and then link to them within your own policy...

So are we to conclude thatrefers to another 'rival' non google (well non google in the sense of not being chrome/chromium, but still quite possibly based on chromium) browser?

But bankrolled by a corporation that does, with their services installed on an "opt-out" basis...

On DNS over HTTPS, it's worth noting that the OpenBSD Firefox port maintainer disabled it in their port last year:

https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=arti...20190911113856
The Mozilla rationale for DNS over HTTPS is simply:
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

So the solution for ISPs supposedly selling your data, is to pipe everything via a specific secure DNS provider - Cloudflare.

I for one am not impressed with Cloudflare's security, privacy or quality track records. Based on that, I don't trust Cloudflare to not sell the data it collects.

For me this looks like the latest "revenue stream" disguised as privacy/security stunt. As with search providers, there is a "deal" and I can see where this also opens the doors for yet more "deals", from competing DNS over HTTPS providers...

As long as FF keeps giving its (advanced) users almost full control (incl., afaics, ALL unasked-for connections) via user.js, all is not lost.
I still don't like what they're doing to the unwashed masses, though. And how many people they're overpaying for NOT coding.
It really has become "The lesser of two Evils".

ISTM the problem is that everyone wants a free lunch, but no such thing exists. If Mozilla is going to employ competent software engineers/coders/whatever, it has to pay them a decent wage. Like any other company, it expects to make a profit, else why exist at all. Money has to come from somewhere, and nobody is paying for a browser. You want a browser that is totally free from any sort of information sale, that is up to date, works well and is safe? You have to pay for that, one way or another, and compromises may have to be made. That's how capitalism works.

curl -sSL www.mozilla.org | grep -oPz '(?<=title>)[^<]+'


sed 's/ \w*o\w*//g'

I believe the issue is not so much about overpaying developers, but an executive who is being paid an eye watering sum, while market share has fallen.
While I do somewhat agree, it's a "non-profit" organisation, not Alphabet, IBM or Oracle for example.

They subsist through donation, they make grand claims about privacy on their website, while distributing what many consider to be google's data mining / telemetry software, built in on an opt out basis. An all of that while casting aspersions about ISPs and other browsers.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/source...e-search-deal/

According to that article the google deal is worth $400 - $450 million per year. So the privacy conscious "non profit" browser, gaining a huge chunk of it's income from a massive corporation who makes it's living from quite the opposite...

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I did not mean to imply that the developers are overpaid, only that they must be paid. The corporations which support Mozilla do expect to make money from that support, one way or another. And in the end, There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. There have been many attempts at developing competing browsers, and they have fallen by the wayside. That's unfortunate, but it's true. A viable, stable, robust, competitive browser that completely respects privacy seems to be an elusive pipedream. Firefox is far from perfect, but I see nothing better. I would be happy to be surprised.